Optimal Results for Maintenance Teams and Outsourcing
By Ken Murai, CEO of FacilGo
Efficiency is the best way to succeed in an evolving residential property management industry. Companies can centralize scheduling and outsourcing to streamline their operations, a crucial strategy for minimizing costs and response times while maximizing workforce productivity.
During a recent 20 for 20 podcast, FacilGo CEO Ken Murai shared how property management companies can centralize scheduling and outsourcing to optimize their maintenance best practices — and we’ll share his tips here.
Out with the old
Traditional property management strategies use up valuable team member hours to make maintenance and outsourcing decisions at each individual property.
Here are a few reasons this is the wrong idea:
- Wasted effort: Technicians receive jobs reactively rather than strategically, leading to lost time and redundant tasks.
- Costly outsourcing: Individual properties may rely too heavily on third-party vendors, and over pay for fixing maintenance issues.
- Long waits: Manual non-optimal scheduling creates delays in assigning work orders, creating a backlog and dissatisfied residents.
- Inconsistent service: Different properties develop their own vendor relationships, leading to varying service quality and pricing across a portfolio.
In with the new: Key benefits of centralized scheduling
The first key benefit of maintenance centralization, smart scheduling maximizes productivity by assigning maintenance requests based on technician availability, skills, and location. AI-powered scheduling tools can prioritize urgent repairs to eliminate emergencies, optimize technician routes to reduce travel time, prevent burnout by balancing workloads, and allocate specialists and general technicians to appropriate tasks.
Meanwhile, floating regional maintenance teams can replace site-based staff, allowing companies to flexibly scale labor needs to demand and assign HVAC, plumbing, and electrical specialists across multiple properties instead of hiring specialists for each site. More productive in-house resources also reduce reliance on expensive external vendors.
An AI-driven platform: The key to centralization
Centralizing maintenance requires more than just a floating team of personnel — an AI-driven platform can automatically assign members of these team members where they’re needed most, while freeing up human administrators for other key tasks and reducing reliance on outside contractors.
Instead of leaving vendor relationships up to individual property teams, a centralized system can:
- reduce costs by negotiating bulk pricing and contracts with preferred vendors.
- track performance to ensure high-quality service.
- hold vendors to strict response time and quality standards.
AI-driven maintenance assignment can also tackle the challenge of after-hours maintenance, when team members are off the clock and outsourcing is the only option. These systems can automatically contact the nearest pre-approved vendors and streamline after-hours approvals to speed response times exactly when residents are the most anxious.
Choose the right centralized maintenance platform. Your platform should:
- assign work orders based on technician location and expertise.
- optimize routes to reduce travel time between jobs.
- match technician skill and experience to appropriately complex tasks.
Use AI to manage your regional maintenance team. You will automatically:
- distribute specialized technicians to service multiple properties.
- dispatch efficiently through mobile devices and GPS.
- optimize productivity with data-powered insights from every job.
Standardize outsourcing and vendor management on a single platform. This way you can:
- analyze maintenance data to make outsourcing more cost effective.
- ensure consistent pricing across all properties by standardizing vendor contracts.
- automate vendor selection by task, urgency, and availability.
Integrate data and performance tracking to constantly improve performance with:
- optimal response times for outsourced vs. in-house jobs.
- cost comparisons between vendor contracts and in-house tasks.
- technician productivity metrics to boost efficiency.
Ready to embrace maintenance centralization?
Manual scheduling and ad hoc outsourcing is the wrong fit for any company looking to compete in a changing market. Industry leaders need AI-powered scheduling to manage floating maintenance teams and strategic vendor assignment, which can only reduce costs and boost resident satisfaction at ever-more-efficient properties.
Ready to revolutionize your maintenance strategy? Let us know in the comments!
